Lords of the Realm 2 Cheats

In order to complete these cheats, you will need to have a hex editor installed on your computer. You will need to find your saved Lords of the Realm 2 game. Should be somewhere in Program Files. C://Program Files/Sierra/Lords 2/save1 "save1" will be whatever you put in the save game field when saving your game. Once opened there will be a long list of numbers and letters. Find the following numbers and change the values to FF in order to gain the correlating cheat.

If a province is losing around 160 happiness per season from taxes, the -160 happiness will rollover to about +120 happiness. This will be shown directly in the tax box. Additional taxes lower the 120.
The only way to get -160 happiness for taxes is to have about 7 provinces all at 50% tax becuse of the -15 happiness to all counties for each one and the -50 for itself. Then, not only will you have an almost unlimited income, you will have a huge happiness bonus for all provinces. Not immensely useful- you need 7 procinces for it to work, but it's fun to do at the end of a game.
Also, watch out for happiness itself's rollover. Once I had a province with 100 happiness and getting 30 happiness/turn, and the next turn it went to 0- another rollover. Don't worry, when at 0, the happiness will start to go up again, but it is unsettling for a turn or two.

After you have sent a message to any one of the nobles, save your game then reload. You will get the reply in the same season you sent them.

If you really want to get ahead the game, you will
need money and happiness of peasants. In order to do this, start
the game by selling most of your cows and all of your crossbows.
These are worth a lot of money and provide start up cash for your
goal. Buy about 1500 to 2000 units of wheat and ration your food
so that most of the consumption is of grain, and very little cows.
Then, set your taxes at 6%, and buy lots of iron and a little
wood. Make your blacksmith produce armor (knights), and sell them
when the merchant arrives again. Repeat, and you will be very
rich over time. Use the money you make for upgrades to castles,
buying other weapons, buying mercenary groups, or more food for
your peasants. This strategy depends on you building up your territory
first, then striking out at neighboring counties. Another tip
is to attack the middle county out of an enemy's land that touches
yours. This does two things. The first is you gain another county.
The second is you will split his land mass up and he will actually
lose control of more than just the one county. Obviously, be ready
for retaliation.
Strategy: by Laura Omniscient
Strategy: by Wendell Martin

When you move from the open battlefield to siege warfare, be prepared to shift your whole attitude. Whereas conventional battles tend to be resolved rather quickly, sieges will take several seasons to conclude, successfully or not. Whether you're planning to storm a castle or defend one, you must plan siege operations carefully and methodically.

True, most sieges climax with a desperate melee inside the castle walls, but you'll usually spend much more time trying to breach those walls or prevent the enemy from doing so. Archers really come into their own during sieges, so you may want to reorganize your army a season or two in advance of a siege, so that you'll have more of them.

Before you can hope to storm a castle, you must thin out the ranks of the defenders. Only massed arrow fire or catapults can do that. If you attempt to wheel up your siege towers and battering rams before you've weakened the garrison, chances are that the crews will be slaughtered and the siege will fail.

If you're defending a castle, be very careful about when and where you deploy your vats of boiling oil. Remember that you only get a certain number of these per castle, and once they're used up, your ability to repulse an assault diminishes greatly. Watch out for feints by the attacker and try to save the oil for use against towers and battering rams -- its effect can be spectacular, if not decisive.

And finally, a word about guerrilla tactics. If you are not yet strong enough to engage in a full-strength campaign against a more powerful neighbor, simply march an army cross-country and on to a square containing a mine, quarry, sawmill or forge and that facility will turn to a pile of blackened cinders, with serious consequences to your enemy's economy. Of course, this only works if you can hurriedly withdraw your force before the enemy can intercept it.

It's also a double-edged tactic. If you conduct such raids into a province you plan to occupy soon, you'll also be damaging your own economy, since those ruined facilities cannot be made operational again without many seasons of effort being devoted to rebuilding them.